Cultivating the Close
Any Given Day
I. Cultivating the Close
I have clung to the dirt on the ground
But this learning comes slow
Building upon small nutrients takes time
This garden, writhing hands of our love, and mutually singular need,
All I knead to comfort me through my years
II. Transport
How can I restrict you?
Perhaps your Uhaul travails are attempts
To be near kin
Or you seek education, and your move is to
Create it again
Are we moving away from
Or towards our better selves?
III. Coming Home
When I feel too large I trip myself into scales
And find comfort in proportions of the absurd
How galactic twinkles careening through space
Won’t make it to my retinas in my lifetime
Or even the Earth’s
The universes are filled with anything but emptiness,
Tucked in round corners of warp: endless humility
In the face of your love I have endless humility
Your poems are intimate, questioning, and quietly expansive, moving from the soil beneath your hands to the far reaches of the cosmos without ever losing emotional focus. Cultivating the Close and Transport both work in the space between attachment and autonomy, exploring love as something rooted yet mobile, tender yet evolving. Coming Home is the strongest of the three, it’s shift from cosmic scale to personal humility is striking, and the final line lands with a resonant, unforced sincerity that ties the collection together with grace.
Gorgeous. That last line, oof